Story Of A Bored Reddit Hacker — “I Stole Tons Of Subreddits Just For Fun”

A hacker, who is on Twitter, with username @TehBVM, got bored and has been playing around with several subreddits by defacing them or by stealing the data of those subreddits.

This bored hacker has been doing the same for the past one week and some of the subreddits targeted by him are –/r/Battlefield_One, /r/Battlefield, /r/Pics, /r/GameOfThrones, /r/StarWars, /r/Cars, /r/Gay, /r/HowToHack, /r/MarvelStudios, r/LosAngelesRams, /r/Autism, /r/OutOfTheLoop, /r/Robocraft and the long list goes on.

Over a week of hacking, which he terms as ‘jacking’, he has lost the count of the number of jacks and it could be as high as more than 70 subreddits jacks. He did everything for fun just because he was bored and there was not any serious purpose behind it.

He has even defaced some of the subreddits pages and asked users to contact their moderators or admins or him using their Twitter handles. Here is one of those pictures of defaced subreddit pages:

As far as the Reddit security is concerned, there is no two-factor authentication on Reddit. This made it easier for the hacker to hack using the moderator or administrator account.

The situation seems that the hacker took advantage of the leaked data as a result of some data breach. Using those data breaches, the hacker was able to get the password of people who were the admin and mods on the subreddits because most of the times people use the same password for other services as well.

It looks like the hacker got lucky and was able to deface several subreddits. But, on the other hand, Reddit was very prompt in taking an action against it.

Reddit says,

“ We take the security of our users and moderators seriously, and are working to implement features that will help bolster account safety in the near future.” 

I hope Reddit knows what features they are working on and implements them soon.